India Server Market Posts On-Year Revenue Growth of 15.9% to $353.1 million in 2Q18

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The overall server market in India witnessed a year-over-year (YoY) increase of 15.9% in terms of revenue to reach $353.1 million in Q2 2018 versus $304.6 million in Q2 2017, according to the latest IDC Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) Quarterly Server Tracker, Q2 2018. The x86 server market registers growth for the third consecutive quarter accounting for 93.5% of overall server market in terms of revenue during Q2 2018. Large deals from IT and ITeS companies and cloud providers followed by Tier-1 telcos, manufacturing and banking continued to drive demand in Q2 2018.

Digitalization is driving and transforming the IT architecture amongst end-users across different verticals resulting in increasing the need to launch new applications and services towards creating innovative offerings for customers. We have observed that application availability and performance are paramount to businesses and would continue to create demand for agile, scalable and robust compute in the coming years.

The non x86 server market generated $23.0 million revenue, with a YoY decline of 15%age points, in Q2 2018. IBM led the market with a revenue share of 62.6%, followed by Oracle with share of 25.1 and HPE with 12.3% during Q2 2018. Banking remains top vertical with 59.2% revenue share followed by utilities, manufacturing and professional services with 14.7%, 9.6% and 9.0% respectively, during Q2 2018.

The x86 server market in terms of revenue witnessed a YoY growth of 18.9% to reach $330.1 million in Q2 2018 up from $277.5 million during Q2 2017. Professional services, telecommunications and manufacturing were the top three verticals accounting for 82.2% of the overall x86 server market. In terms of form factor, Rack optimized and blade servers accounts for 3/4th of overall x86 server revenues in Q2 2018.

“End-users in the India market demand simplicity, reliability, scalability in all of their IT solutions. Vendors positioning these key technology elements in their product/solution are expected to make significant strides in their business ” says Ranganath Sadasiva , Director, Enterprise Research, IDC India.

In Q2 2018, the top two vendors kept their positions in the X86 server market. HPE led the India x86 server market with revenue share of 28.4% to reach $93.83 million in Q2 2018 followed by Dell with share of 25.0% to reach $82.42 million The major deals for HPE came from telecommunications and professional services verticals, while Dell successfully registered incremental deals from existing customers across Professional services and manufacturing. Lenovo has overtaken Cisco as third largest server vendor in India during Q2 2018, due to a big win from one of the largest public cloud service provider; Cisco came fourth winning customers across different verticals with a revenue share of 7.6%. Also, ODM direct market share declined YoY by 0.7% and accounted for 24.1% share in Q2 2018.

“India server market shows positive sign of growth with compute platforms continue to be the backbone of digital economy. Volume server category revenue contribution depicts that it is the most preferred price range for compute and how end-users are choosing to run clusters of low-cost servers for some of the most demanding applications.,” says Harshal Udatewar , Market Analyst, Server, IDC India. 

IDC India Forecast

Government investment remains as the primary driver towards creating the digital economy. Key investment areas focussed by Government includes Smart city, State Wide Area Network (SWAN), Bharatnet, National supercomputing mission (NSM) and others which are expected to create considerable demand of servers in the coming year.

From vertical standpoint, major telcos spending would be focussed towards preparing for 5G roll out, creating value-added services and modernisation of networks across India creating incremental demand of compute. IT and ITeS service providers would realign their focus towards developing new-age technologies such as Analytics, mobility, AI, IoT platforms, blockchain and continue to create incremental demand for servers. Manufacturing end-users spending would be directed towards SCM and ERM solutions which would require substantial compute demand to run the production environment. Banks would continue to spend on traditional compute for monetizing value from chunks of data and providing innovative offerings to their customers.

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International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. With more than 1,100 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. IDC's analysis and insight helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based technology decisions and to achieve their key business objectives. Founded in 1964, IDC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world's leading media, data and marketing services company.